Sunday, April 25, 2004

The Eye in the Sky

Whether or not the President decides to attack the holdouts in Fallujah, the
next months will see a gradual increase to US military capability in the shape
of armed UAVs. One system specifically tailored for Iraq is the Viper
Strike-Hunter combination. The Hunter
UAV is a long endurance, fairly high altitude platform which has been
extensively used in Iraq.
It is able to remain overhead unseen by the ground observer for hours. With the Viper-Strike
munition and others like it, the armed UAV solves the time-lag
problem in air targeting.

Right now the ability to “park” a UAV over a trouble spot is one of
the systems’ greatest advantages, said Dyke Weatherington – deputy of the
UAV planning task force in the defense secretary’s office – in a recent
interview. “These systems ... park over the bad guys, watch them
continually, never give them a break from (our monitoring) their activities
and severely limit their ability to mount an effective threat,” he said.
... "operators would see targets of opportunity with UAVs but have to
call in manned aircraft to attack them, Weatherington said. “In many cases,
we either couldn’t get strikes to the target in time or the manned aircraft
couldn’t find that target the UAV had found,” he said.

By arming the UAV the ability to "park" over the the enemy and
destroy him becomes fused into a single platform. US forces, seeking to improve
on the Apache-Hellfire combination that Israel has used to target the Hamas
leadership, adopted the Viper Strike glide weapon because it can
drop nearly straight down silently, making it ideal for use in mountainous
areas and urban canyons.

Another class of armed UAV aimed particularly at patrolling roads and
counter-ambushing forces which mine roadways is the Dragonfly-Metal Storm
combination. The Dragonfly airframe is extremely small, a
UFO-like object the size of motorcycle and is of very advanced design that
allows it to deploy like a helicopter yet range out like fixed wing. But it will
carry a multibarreled 40 mm Metal Storm grenade launcher.

The Metal
Storm system is an Australian designed weapon which consists of stacked
rounds in a set of barrels which can be fired electronically at unbelievable
rates. A system like the Dragonfly might be armed with a two barrel launcher
with eight 40 mm rounds (I'm guessing here) all of which could be fired in a
fraction of a second. It could be all over for an enemy unit before they even
react.

But airframes and guns are not as impressive as developments in sensors and
software. The US is deploying the 21st century equivalent of the Civil War
balloon to Baghdad. The Martin-Lockheed
Aerostat will stay aloft continuously, and it opens the possibility of
"replaying" traffic movements from a God's eye point of view.
Combining sensors like synthetic aperture array radar and persistent platforms
will increase the risks of mortaring targets in Baghdad dramatically. The real
breakthroughs could be in software. There have been reports that recognition
software has advanced to the point where it can recognize individual faces from
the air. This, from Aviation
Now (hat tip: The
UAV Blog):

Intrigued by the possible applications to UAV surveillance video, the
UAVB conducted a test last year at Eglin using streaming video from a Pointer
UAV. A captain's face was entered into the computer as a search item, and the
UAV was launched. "It starts beeping on this clump of trees," Cook
said. "And they had to drive the UAV about another two miles before they
could get close enough [to see] there was a vehicle underneath the
trees." The captain whose face had been loaded into the computer was
sitting in his truck eating lunch. "It found his face through the trees,
through the windscreen, in the shadows of the trees, and we went, 'Wow, we
need to explore this,'" Cook said.

Dubbed DIVOT (Digital Imagery and Video Object Tracking), the software
later was put to work on pre-recorded video taken by a Predator UAV in Iraq.
The system was provided with imagery of certain objects, then told to identify
them in another video. "The scene is a flat desert with some black clumps
on it," Cook said. "And when the Predator is about 10 miles away, it
starts beeping on one of the clumps. And it takes probably five minutes for
the Predator to fly close enough where you can finally make out with the human
eye that it's even [an object], let alone the one that we told it to
find."

Even current systems are probably unbearable to anticoalition forces. On
April 24, a rocket attack was directed against Taji
Airforce base, killing 5 Americans, suggesting an effort to strike back at
the tormenting Eyes in the Sky. In one sense, the prodigious American
technological engine assures a near chronic imbalance between US military
capability, which has increased exponentially and the slow, uncertain and labor
intensive process of political transformation. The contemptuous ease with which
US Marines ambushed
and killed 11 insurgents in Fallujah without resort to any wonder weapons
illustrates a hidden peril in the Iraqi campaign. It is sometimes observed that
allies fighting alongside US troops, and the Iraqi police may be no exception,
develop a dependence on the American way of war without the American means. One
can sympathize on a certain level, with an Iraqi policeman who hesitates at
entering a Fallujah 'mosque' to serve a warrant, at considerable danger to
himself, when the incomprehensible Americans could demolish it in a second were
they not perplexingly constrained by rules he could never understand. It also
creates the temptation in this politico-military theater to reduce politics to
the junior partner of the very capable military. The interesting thing about
recent US operations in Iraq has been the incorporation of explicitly
political elements into the tactical campaign itself.

U.S. officials are still pursuing two other efforts to defuse the crisis
short of house-to-house urban combat. On one hand, they are offering millions
of dollars to help rebuild the city in an effort to coax Iraqis to join them
in disarming the insurgents and policing the city. On the other, they are
conducting selective strikes aimed at thinning the ranks of the insurgents.
Early Saturday, Marines called in AC-130 "Spectre" gunships and
killed about 30 Arabs at an encampment along the Euphrates River after two
people were spotted setting up a mortar.

"I can rubble that city and reduce it to crushed stone and walk
over it quickly. But that is not the ideal, it may be the worst thing to
do," said Col. John Coleman, chief of staff of the 30,000-strong 1st
Marine Expeditionary Force, in charge of military operations across Anbar
province, where Fallujah is located. "I don't want to be owning Fallujah
with some Marines downtown who are getting potshots everyday because we took
no Iraqis with us."

This fusion of politics and warfare, long forgotten by modern armies, is a
process that would be strangely familiar to Julius Caesar and the
emperor-generals of the ancient world who treated with brigands and conquered
chieftains, laying and raising sieges, threatening destruction or granting
clemency, offering bribes and accepting service. And it is strangely emblematic
of the current struggle -- the camels, the sand, and the antedeluvian hatreds --
resolving themselves beneath a constellation of American robotic aircraft.